MONTCLAIR — Hours after her mother was fatally shot at a Montclair YMCA, 11-year-old Essence Duckett told a detective that she knew her father had fired the gun — she was only a few feet away at the time — but she didn’t remember actually seeing him.

In a 30-minute video interview that was played today at the murder trial of her father, Kenneth Duckett, Essence described that day when she and her mother, Monica Paul, were at the Y to watch her little brother’s swim lesson.

She recounted the confrontation overheard between Paul, 31, and Duckett, which took place around 6:25 p.m. on June 26, 2008, inside a small room that looked out onto the pool. The mother and daughter were there, along with a dozen other parents, when Duckett entered.

The couple, who had been together for years, had broken up months earlier, and Paul had a restraining order against him; he retained visitation rights of the two children.

When Duckett walked in, Essence heard her father’s voice, but never saw the man. Paul, startled that Duckett had come, asked why he was there. "‘To see my son,’" the girl remembered a voice that sounded like her father say.

Several parents who were in the room at the time, and who have testified at the trial, repeated a similar account of what transpired.

Raising her arm in the air and pointing her fingers like a gun, Essence told the detective how it happened. Just before the shooting, she remembered her mother shout, "Oh my God." Three shots followed, "boom boom boom," she said on the video.

Monica Paul was shot six times and died in the chair where she had been watching her son.

The taped interview shows the polite and composed 11-year-old girl sitting at a table, where she answered all questions at Montclair police headquarters but displayed little emotion. "It was him that did the gunshots," she said of her father. She was "99 percent" certain after hearing his voice, then later spotting his truck in the Y’s parking lot.

Duckett’s attorney, Thomas Ashley, conceded on Wednesday at the trial’s opening that his client shot Paul with his .357 caliber handgun that night. He never intended to, Ashley said, but snapped when she said their 4-year-old son Noah wasn’t his own.

Essex County Assistant Prosecutor Rachel Gran has called the killing an ambush and a planned "public execution," which followed a heated phone conversation the two had an hour before.

The trial resumes on Tuesday, with more witness testimony.

On the video, Essence begins slumped low in her chair but sits up when Detective Guy Trogani asks her. She speaks in a flat tone, and only once sounds anxious. "Is my mom dead?" she asked the detective. "I want my mom."

After Essence had run out of the Glenridge Avenue Y following the shooting, she remembered seeing her father’s white Jeep with New York plates in the parking lot. There, she encountered William Johnson, who was in the vehicle, and was a friend of her father. Johnson, who Essence referred to as "Storm," offered to give her a ride, but she refused.

It was Johnson who had dropped Duckett off at the Y, then picked him up blocks away and after the shooting, prosecutors said. Duckett, of Orange, was apprehended days later in Brooklyn, where he was born.

Whether Essence was trying to protect her father or whether she repressed that memory of him shooting her mother was unknown, and the video will stand as her only testimony. News outlets covering the trial today honored Superior Court Judge Joseph Cassini III’s request that her video image not be photographed.

At the end of the taped interview and after a day filled with pain, the camera captures Essence stand up, then slowly push her chair into the table, before walking out of view.